RIPE Atlas

While “Introducing and promoting competition in the registration of domain names” is one of ICANN’s core values, the DNS sits on top of networks running the Internet Protocol. Of course, the operators who run those networks are just as competitive as the registries and registrars in the DNS business but there is a lot of cooperation and sharing as well.

ICANN participates in the RIPE Atlas project, which help network operators diagnose and fix network problems and helps researchers understand network behavior.

We host RIPE Atlas Anchors in our east and west coast data centers. These offer dedicated targets for about 8,800 RIPE Atlas probes, including nine located in our hub and engagement center offices, distributed around the globe.

The probes provide an effective measure of how different networks can see key pieces of Internet infrastructure, like root DNS servers. The Anchors offer high capacity targets for those probes to measure against using tools like ping, traceroute, DNS, HTTP and HTTPS. Network operators around the globe can use the combined network to analyze the quality of their connectivity, measure topology changes, and diagnose and debug network issues.

ICANN is proud to participate in the RIPE Atlas project as an anchor host, probe host, and sponsor.